Someone patted Amir Khusrau on his shoulder as he slept leaning against the wall of a house on the street. ‘Amir sahib, Amir sahib,’ he called.
Opening his eyes, Khusrau looked at the man before him and the daylight that spread behind him. The street was still deserted.
‘Mirza, what has happened to these streets?’ asked Khusrau.
‘What are you doing in these streets? Why have you come here looking for people?’ countered Mirza Ghalib.
‘I don’t know…I was suddenly searching for…for many things.’
Khusrau’s eyes were restless. He went on, his voice faltering: ‘It was right, Mirza, what you asked me. I served seven kings, spending my days in their palaces; I sang in seven courts. I varied the pitch of my sitar to suit the tastes of each court. I praised murderers exactly as I had praised their victims. I wrote about whatever happened in front of me and whatever I saw at each particular moment, not caring to see the difference between the one and the other. But that does not mean my soul was not searching for something, Mirza.’
‘You are the poet of poets, Amir.’
Khusrau paid no attention to this praise. He went on with what he was saying: ‘I met a man at night here. An extraordinary person. I was chasing a familiar raga that had suddenly come floating out to me from the street. The raga, its melody, its identity, eluded me. And yet that man pointed it out to me with the greatest ease. He even made out who I was! But the most amazing thing was that I felt he was the person I had been seeking for years, subconsciously, without even being aware of it.’
They began to walk along together and Khusrau continued to describe his experience.
When he finished, Ghalib said: ‘I too was searching for someone the whole night—you! Wondering how I would find you, who were so far away, here in this street.’
‘Why were you searching for me?’
‘Amir sahib, you said that you wrote about whatever appeared before you by chance—kings, palaces, dancing girls, precious gems, dishes prepared in the royal kitchens, paan, drinks, acrobats, rope walkers…I wrote about the calamities that happened before my eyes: the mutinies and the blood baths. Yesterday, I completed a poem on Queen Victoria, who rules the world. But all these were topics I consciously selected. In fact, while I lay on the stone bench in prison, suffering the bites of mosquitoes and bugs, I decided I would burn my flame only to strike off a thousand reflections from the glass columns of the royal palaces.’
‘What are you driving at, Mirza?’ Khusrau’s tone betrayed irritation.
‘My question is, do not you, me and all poets write on subjects that we consciously and willingly search for and select? To be honest, we are not just mirrors, Amir sahib.’
They had arrived at Nizamuddin. Khusrau stopped. ‘You know I cannot go beyond this point, Mirza.’
Ghalib, who had walked two steps ahead, turned back. Khusrau stood with one foot resting on his tombstone. Ghalib laughed, came back to his own tomb and placed a foot on it.
‘I too have a tomb here,’ said Ghalib. ‘The truth is that when questions come up that are difficult to answer, we poets and thinkers search for excuses to take refuge in. In death, in the limitations of space, in the framework of time that we claim to have lived in…’
‘And what about the man I met at night? What do you say about him?’
Ghalib did not answer immediately.
Standing on their tombs, they looked at the swarm of huts which had sprung up around the dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia and their own tombs. A slender spiral of smoke threaded its way towards the sky from one of the roofs. A flock of birds flew in perfect formation from one end of the sky to the other. Faint human voices made gashes in the frozen silence.
Pausing every now and then, Ghalib said: ‘What actually matters is what we explore and what we select for ourselves from a world filled with all that we do not explore or select. Because I choose to burn my flame so that it will reflect in a thousand glass pillars in the royal palaces, it does not mean that the slums outside are not steeped in darkness. What that man in the street saw was something that we did not—the blind cat. Look around you, Amir sahib, the streets you had thought were deserted are now…’
Ghalib pointed to the basti, which was becoming steadily noisier. People kept coming out of the houses. The streets were bustling with activity and shrieks and moans arose from them. Men ran through the streets with knives drawn. One house caught fire, then many houses. A riot had broken out—it could have been between foreigners and natives, between Hindus and Muslims, between Bangladeshis and Indians, between the soldiers of Ghiyasuddin Tughluq and the believers of Nizamuddin Aulia, between peerzada wholesale dealers and ragpickers who went from door to door collecting empty bottles, old newspapers, polythene bags…